We shouldn’t be forced to choose whether we’re Scottish or British – we can be both

Less than a month to go until Scotland’s referendum and I’m now sixty meetings into my 100 open air street meetings across Scotland. I marked the halfway point in Glasgow city centre’s Buchanan Street. Hundreds of people joined in. The City Council Leader Gordon Matheson and I enjoyed the good old fashioned politics in the Glasgow drizzle.

Fast forward a couple of days and after campaign stops in Bathgate and Linlithgow with Michael Connarty MP, I was off to Edinburgh and my first ever performances at its festival. I did a gig with Labour supporting comedian Matt Forde (I’ll tweet the link to the podcast of the show with Matt once it’s up). One of the brilliant things about my #100Streets tour is that the public have better one liners than most comedians and it has given me loads of material for years to come. A humorous heckle can be far more effective than the endless nationalist screams of ‘Traitor’, ‘Quisling’ and ‘Collaborator’, which greet so many of my appearances in Scotland’s streets.

I also got my two Irn-Bru crates out as my makeshift stage on the Royal Mile. A mixture of referendum voters and inquisitive tourists joined in our debate. There was also a guest appearance by Edinburgh’s Sheila Gilmore MP.

As I travel around I get a sense of Scotland’s diversity and our multiple identities. I made a short film for the BBC this week about identity and the referendum. I took the camera crew to Arden, the housing scheme in Glasgow’s southside, where I spent most of my early years. Much has changed. The local Co-op’s now a Polish deli and just a couple of miles away lie Scotland’s biggest Jewish and Muslim communities.

We also filmed at the banks of the river Clyde. Glasgow is a city not without its scars. The river gave the city its shape. It’s also the first thing that generations of immigrants saw when they arrived in their adopted country, under its dark low skies and where newcomers brought multiple cultures. Part of our city’s identity is a sense of working class pride and men and women with a sense of industrial heritage. A bit like Liverpool and the Mersey, Glasgow and the Clyde and synonymous with that identity of pride and working class tradition.

In the past there were of course too many people who wanted the newcomers to leave their heritage at the quayside and immediately assimilate. Some of those who arrived faced racism or religious sectarianism.

But despite all of those problems modern Scotland is a hotchpotch of identities – immigrants have come here, brought their language, their culture, their food and made our country more prosperous and diverse. But we also share things across these islands, north and south across our non-existent border: those bonds of class, of family and also a shared history. And what sense does it make in a modern world to be forced into a false choice about being either Scottish or British when we can be both?

Previous political change, immigration and social movements have all been about adding identities. September 18th is the first time that Scots have been invited en masse to jettison part of our identity that most of us feel comfortable with. The SNP know this only too well and it’s why they now claim we can leave Britain and still be British and even travel on a British passport post-independence. But the SNP know that many of the ‘yet to make their mind up’ Scots also feel a sense of Britishness. Hence their new slogan could very well be ‘Vote to leave Britain and stay British’. They seem to ignore the nature of independence movements the world over. Look across the water. The Irish Republic’s independence wasn’t about retaining a sense of Britishness. Catalonia’s independence movement isn’t about leaving Spain and somehow staying Spanish.

The SNP’s politics of national identity are now more flexible than any contortionist at the Edinburgh Fringe – only less successful.

Jim Murphy is the MP for East Renfrewshire and the Shadow Secretary of State for International Development